I'm not a fan of wind- big, ugly, noisy, and deadly to birds.
Why is nuclear not considered an option to fight climate change?
Why is nuclear not considered an option to fight climate change?
Wind does not kill birds in significant numbers, that is misinformation.
Offshore wind is many miles out to sea, so it hardly matters if they’re big, ugly or noisy. It also reduces the effect on birds from negligible to nonexistent. In practice they are a few dots on the horizon, if we really are not willing to put up with such a minor inconvenience we might as well give up now.
>Only a decade ago, [US] nuclear reactors were cash cows. But a combination of low natural gas prices and a boom in solar and wind power has rendered them unable to compete in states with price competition for power. Five of the country’s nuclear plants have shut down in the past decade. Of the remaining 99, at least a dozen more may close in the next.
Also here in the UK the govenment is spending £20 bn to build the Hinkley Point reactor and "The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the "strike price" will be £50 billion."
As a tax payer I'd rather they'd spent our £70bn on a few windmills.
"ugly" - you hate pinwheels???
"noisy" - I've gone right up to the base of farm-based wind turbines and don't remember any terrible noise. And they're never built right next to a house.
"deadly to birds" - nope
I'd rather have windmills than an entire town abandoned and a power plant that appears to still be melted down to this day.
are they really noisy? the big windmill farms i see here in Texas just seem awesome and they put a smile on my face as i drive through 'em.
Sadly, too little research is going into nuclear, largely due to public perception; plants that use thorium or recycle waste have a ton of promise but little public interest. Meanwhile, Germany needs to find out what to do with about a third of their wind turbines in the next few years, as they're about to hit end of life and the parts are difficult or impossible to reuse and recycle.
Not to mention the environmental consequences of solar and wind production, but hey, chromium and cadmium poisoning doesn't sound as scary as a mushroom cloud irradiating half the country.
If we had invested the same amount of effort in making Nuclear energy safe as we did in lobbying against it, we would probably have reduced our carbon footprint enormously already. Weirdest/Biggest missed chance for climate change.
Is that a necessarily bad thing? Serious question.
The nuclear waste that we generate is concentrated in the Nuclear Reactors and thus can be tracked and managed (I'm assuming a reasonable amount of competency and lack of natural disasters etc.). We could just store it locked away in concrete containers far from any human population centers.
Perhaps in the future we discover a use for all that waste. Or perhaps space travel becomes cheap enough that we start jettisoning the waste to the Sun, or any other low-cost orbital trajectory.
Right now, the CO2 generate from fossil fuels is just dumped into the environment and we know that is causing climate change and is a clear, immediate and existential threat to humanity.
Is the decision really that hard to make?
My understanding is that renewable energy is curently cheaper than that from new nuclear power stations.
Also if you stop fossil fuel power plants, there are still many other sources of atmospheric CO2 and methane.
No, we can't, because the spent fuel waste continuously generates heat. It has to be actively cooled to stop it from catching fire and emitting all those decay products into the atmosphere.
A lot of commercial spent nuclear fuel is sitting around in such dry casks. They are expected to last 100 years or so; if we haven't figured out a better plan by then we can just shift the spent fuel into fresh dry casks.
Really? I find them beautiful. White, majestic, slowly spinning. When biking, I'll often stop to watch. I'm sorry you feel that way.
> noisy
In this case the noise is irrelevant because they'll be out to sea. I've never been close enough to one to hear it: what do they sound like?